What you say may be true, but it doesn't mean it's the right behaviour for a large company.
Some Spectrums were home-built (I know they offered a solder-kit for cheaper prices than a shop-built one). However, I agree that they had a few design flaws because of the same sorts of problems and component pricing of the time, etc. If I remember, the RAM on the early models was actually bog-standard RAM of the day where one half had failed but left enough to be usable for Sinclair's purposes. The price of buying all-new chips was prohibitive. It was also a bit "open", in that the joystick and rear interfaces were direct electrical connections to the mainboard and that even the expansion socket never had any sorts of covers. I can envisage that all this was *known* at the time and it was the result of a trade-off, but the modern XBox failures seem to be more due to either underestimating the problems, choosing to ignore them, or not knowing about them - whichever way you look at it, that's incompetence.
(P.S. Still a proud owner of at least one working 16K and one working 48K Spectrum with peripherals and tapes - although I have destroyed at least two boards and a PSU for a 48K by being a bit over-exuberant while playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon as a youngster).
Ah, the age-old stupidity. Good graphics != good game. If you think so, you were probably brought up on XBoxes and Playstations, which means that dedicating an evening to one game is probably a struggle and that thinking or enjoying the game is second to "completing" it or showing it to your mates.
I still play Nethack, ffs, and the graphics on that were far too primitive when I started playing that years ago. Give me an emulator and crap graphics any day of the week - there's not many games that you can replay over and over again and still feel you got your moneys-worth every time you replay it.
It's a common fallacy that versatile means "more fragile", propogated by exactly this sort of poor design and manufacture. Just because you've witnessed it, doesn't mean the opposite (i.e. stable, versatile and modern) isn't possible or available. The problem is that almost EVERYTHING modern is rushed out the door to sell it, especially games consoles - build it cheap, stack it high. "Fix it in firmware" are words that you DO NOT want to hear - it means someone isn't doing their job. Even the ability of upgrading firmware should be rarely used, hard to do and positively discouraged.
It's like the people who say "Well, Vista should crash more, it's newer!". No, it shouldn't - it should be learning by the mistakes of the past few decades and be virtually uncrashable (this is NOT impossible - and yet in two trials of Vista I've crashed machines within literally hours of building them for my workplace without even doing anything "fancy" like installing drivers or applications, or installing new hardware, or using unsupported or broken hardware, etc.). In fact, the exact opposite should be true and it should be more reliable, faster on the same machine, and do more, because it's based on decades-old technology with a new sheen. System requirements should not be going up as quickly as they are (almost damn exponential!) - and now that we're hitting limits (CPU speed, etc.), some OS and programs are showing their limitations and actually getting SLOWER on the top-end hardware because they rely on things just getting faster every year. There was a time when a PC upgrade meant that everything ran faster. Now it merely means that things run.
In terms of software, reliability should be going *up* all the time - the software should be getting fixed more and more as time goes on, not thrown out with each new iteration. You win by making things SIMPLE and reuseable, not complex. The simpler they are, the easier they are to find problems, the less they have to go wrong, the easier they are to fix. That's *software*. Easily updateable, changeable *software*. Hardware should be a million times more solid.
Games consoles are enclosed systems. Their hardware has been fixed to a finite set of components that will not change. Their OS software has a long time in which to be designed and is very basic - load game, run it, everything else should be handled by the application, so it's not like you have to update the DirectX drivers to fix a bug in a shader model or some such crap - the game works or doesn't and it's the game manufactures fault if it doesn't (this is the way it SHOULD work, anyway... I'm not surprised that MS basically try to make the XBox a mini-PC because it's all they know). Console hardware is *static*. Thus it can be tested *much* more extensively for problems than, say, my bodge-job, home-built, cheap-component PC which has been up now for over a year and never crashed or experienced a hardware problem (or, for that matter, needed any significant hardware maintenance in that time - I think I blew the dust off the fans once while it was still running). Or the dozens of servers, dozens of "blackboxes" and hundreds of client machines that I've built along the same lines in recent years. These things can EASILY run for decades, even being knocked about and moved in school environments. The BBC-Micro's that I pulled out of a skip last year from one school I work at were still perfectly operational despite years of heavy use and having been stored with no maintenance and then thrown (literally) into a skip and having building rubble thrown on them - THAT is solid-state hardware of thirty years ago! They were originally bought as a set of 15. There were still 15 there, all working - one of them we still used for flashing EEPROM's! We should have moved FORWARD from that, not BACKWARD.
A computer should be switched on, work should be done, and then it should be switched off. Anything that causes that cycle not to work under reasonable conditions (i.e. not dropped, not placed in a
The simple fact is that most programming tasks are inherently linear. Sure, you can design programs that are better, and you can offload work to other CPU's in clever ways, but at the end of the day, you can't do that much better than a couple of major threads per program, with all of them running on an empty CPU.
In Office apps, you can't "offload" anything at all, really. Possibly a spellcheck or grammar check on the side, but you're not going to make *any* gains over the simplistic setups. Why? Because 99% of the program is spent waiting for the user to do something and, when they do, 99% of the time you can complete that task in a matter of microseconds.
In games, you can offload AI, physics, pathfinding, graphics drawing, etc. but at the end of the day you still have to limit interaction to what the user does (i.e. shoots, moves, etc.) and/or the FPS limit. You can get slightly more done by parallelising in that time, purely because the AI is not reliant on the graphics drawing etc., but every 1/60th of a second you have to bring everything to a halt and pass it off to be drawn in order.
In database apps, you can pass off I/O and tricky queries to other threads and so make gains, but you're just introducing a lot of locks, callbacks and everything else to be able to do that. You can scale with that, but you can't scale that far. And at some point, you've got to read the same data off the same disk as on a single-CPU system and pass that, with *all* it's results, to the user.
In operating systems, you can offload a lot of tasks, but again, most of the time you are looking at waiting for user input to actually do something.
It's an inherent limitation of the machinery and the uses, not the design of a particular operating system. Sure, you can make gains over what we have now, but the simple fact is that at some point you have to manage and collate all those seperate tasks into a result and you can't do it until everything's finished. To use games as an example (because they are a mass-market, hardware-pushing, performance-critical application that will routinely make use of multiple CPU's/GPU's to the full extent), you can't necessarily do the AI until the physics has been done (otherwise bots would walk into moving objects that weren't there a second ago). You can't do the graphics until the AI and physics are both done. And over all that, you have to do SOMETHING every 1/60th of a second whether the other threads have finished or not. And there's only so many ways you can split up tasks. You can do graphics rendering in blocks of pixels, as proposed, but at what point does the locking of memory and random bus access killing the memory cache actually make it *less* efficient that just running from 0 to 1024 and then from 0 to 768 (or whatever).
A lot of applications *don't* thread things that they should. On the desktop, asynchronous DNS is a major culprit in my opinion - I should not be able to hang file manager windows, firewalls, browsers, FTP clients, etc. just because my DNS server has gone down or is momentarily inaccessible. And when I click the god-damn Cancel button, then you should CANCEL the other thread as quickly as possible BUT also let me just get on with whatever else I want to do with this app. However, this has nothing to do with multi-core or operating systems, it's to do with single-threaded apps still being made on systems that have reliably handled multi-thread apps (even on single-core machines) for decades. Ideally, EVERY tab in my browser window should be a different thread. It would mean that a tab with a particularly heavy Javascript or particularly slow flash movie will not slow the operation of the browser itself down. It's quite a simple job but a lot of browsers don't do it - there's a reason for that and it's not because GCC or the operating system doesn't include a "pass this off to another thread" function.
The problem is not new, it's not exciting, it's not revolutionary, it's not going to lead to a whole new way to pr
And most of them work just fine in Opera 9.64, despite the scary warnings.
And the ones that don't, it seems to be because Opera deliberately disallows that sort of action (e.g. the pages knowing where they are on screen in relation to other pages).
Intriguing, no doubt. However, does the cost of even 8% extra power to the server really stack up against the air-conditioning or ducting costs at all? That's the problem - it's not that you *can't* run them cold, or hot, it's more likely that one way is just that much more efficient overall.
Personally, I'd be wanting as few moving parts as possible anyway because of the exact problems that you describe, and thus component failures due to the extra heat don't really become a problem. This is why SSD's are on the takeup in datacentres. I'd much rather switch off the air-con, and let the CPU's run hotter and suck more power. (Again, personally, I'd mandate that my datacentre had to have fanless and/or silent systems as much as possible, because you might well gain in the long run by lack of special working arrangements, personnel morale, lack of moving parts, etc.)
I would hazard a guess that it's a damn sight cheaper in *operating costs* (if not initial setup) to run SSD, fan-less (or very few low power fans) systems in a rack and then just let it vent naturally, than it is to run spinning-disk, multiple-fan-driven servers in air-conditioned environment or require special ducting etc. Your startup would have to have proven that to me before I touched you.
Let's face it, if you *want* to cool a computer, there are a million ways of doing it more efficiently than spinning a fan and conditioning all the air in the room surrounding it (I just removed a piece of RAM from a server because it consistently showed 20% greater temperature than identical chips in its place. I replaced a fan on another because it was extremely noisy and doesn't cool any better than a much lower-speed fan. I saved power, heat and component life - but it only cost me a few pounds). It's a question of cost, scalability and practicality. You could water-cool and/or under/over-clock every single server if performance / CPU power consumption were the only issues, but it's just not practical or cost-effective. Massive amounts of electricity are required anyway, most of it running the cooling! (And to handle spikes, and charge the UPS's, and for a safety margin, etc.). But massive amounts of cooling aren't required at all (and you get a bucket-load of your electricity back when you switch it off). The trade-off isn't there.
99% of server components are specced to ludicrous temperatures (e.g. 70 degrees C) anyway, and those that aren't you can easily remove or replace with only minor work. Yes, they will fail quicker and draw more power, but the cost of NOT doing anything is... NOTHING. Just spend what you would have on air-conditioning on new parts/power instead. I don't see how worrying about a few % of power usage is really useful when servers tend to have much more raw CPU speed than they really need (I/O is the limiter in most situations, and thus they could be underclocked or powered down anyway without affecting anything), the efficiency of the power supply and the rest of the system can easily swamp such gains and the air-conditioning really wipes out any potential savings from getting that small %age back. Plus, quite a bit of data-centre hardware is out of the control of the data-centre (e.g. networking, power management, climate monitoring, etc.) so asking them to constantly duct third-party hardware is a bit tough, when they could just not worry about it at all.
It's one of IT's little foibles - we can make a computer that's small, fanless, solid-state, power-saving, no-moving-parts, able to cope with extremes of temperature, shock-proof, even water-tight. We can even get four such systems into a 19" 1U. But the question is what the trade-off's are? Do we lose performance compared to just buying a bog-standard 19" 1U server, do we end up spreading the load too thinly, do we lose out on non-parallelised loads, do we increase the dependency of several server on one piece of hardware, do we have to sacrifice functionality, do we have to buy specialised parts/replacements, do we have to buy from a
This is "new" how? I've been saying this for years and I don't even work in gaming/AI. Any perfectly logical game, the computer AI will incessantly and deliberately fail the game at low levels, thus making it no fun at all. Chess / Snooker / Pool, etc. they all do it... they get the perfect move in under a second that will beat 99.999% of chess players and then discard it because they are supposed to acting stupid and pot the black with a foul that's almost impossible to do *deliberately*.
The *only* way to make AI believable is a feedback system trained to a particular game. Build an FPS, get all the damage, weapons, rules, etc. correct and then just throw some genetic-algorithm bots at it for a few centuries of computer time (hire a damn supercomputer just for this bit if you need to). Penalise the AI for killing the players too much, or being *too* good when it's playing against itself. It will find all the corner cases, all the weaknesses through random variations and use them to their best effect. If you train easy/medium/hard/impossible bots in parallel, your impossible bots should be beating the hard, and so on, and when a human player is placed into the game, they can be "ranked" by the AI. You then use these rankings and statistical knowledge of how much fun each player is having, how old they are, how good a player that *actually* are against other humans and then adjust the rankings/bots accordingly.
Something like Steam is PERFECT for this... provide an "official" Steam bot and you'll have more data for feedback than you can shake a stick out. You can instantly discount all the "stupid" deaths (so you don't get things like bots camping one spot because other bots find it difficult to reach him there etc.) because the GA will sort it all out for you. And because of the way things work, you can even have it auto-adjust to the player in question in real-time if the game is mostly-bots, so if it is kicking the player's arse, it can start toning down a little (not too much) and provide the most fun game (the most fun CounterStrike games are the fairest and closest ones, not the ones where one sides scores 286-0).
Valve should *really* be looking into this... a bot with that much instantaneous feedback is a MASSIVE asset. If you can get it anywhere near playable, self-learning, etc. then you'll be able to run servers full of them rather than have to rely on X amount of players showing up, or the server admin turning bots on manually. You can even tie it in with "death maps" (where in the game most players died and adjust to make sure that the maps are fair for both sides, etc.), global player rankings, achievements, etc. and have it learn new tactics that it *sees*, not just those that it *performs*. So when it dies because of a nice sniping position that the sniper then goes on to control the entire game with, have the both "know" that and try to find ways around him and/or camp that same spot on other servers.
I didn't say it was "clinging", but does it really take that much for it to be cooked into the surface of the fuel tank, or otherwise permanently attached? I'm not saying it could have got to space with nothing more than the little critters hair on fire, but there would be *something* left of it if it *had* stayed attached, which could just be a matter of it being welded to the tank by the heat, or bits of it getting caught in tiny microscopic cracks. Even if that portion was only 0.0001% of it's mass and quite well done, it's still biological matter that can (in certain circumstances) survive in the most extreme conditions - after that, an anaerobic journey and careful re-entry are nothing in comparison.
I don't doubt that you're right, in practice. The point is that in theory, you wouldn't go strapping dead bats to your "sterile" planet.
So you've made the assumptions that: a) bacteria have to live on other life seeing as they are found in radioactive waste and in parts of the world that *have* no other life (e.g. inside the Earth's crust, acidic hot springs etc.), b) heat/cold kills all water-utilizing bacteria (I think we can easily discount this one given the previous information) and c) only water-utilizing bacteria would be present in a dead bat. That's quite a big leap.
It's all moot anyway, the thing probably dropped off before it hit the atmosphere and if it didn't, it would be contained to the Earth's gravitational field.
Guess which one keeps Linux ticking over in the real world? The lawyers are the bit you *can't* get normally. Think about it -I pay you to hack on my system so I can make a new product and/or improve an old one. That requires almost zero dedication from you. Now try - I pay a lawyer to step into court and defend a piece of software that I helped make along with thousands of other people (all of whom are personally accountable to their own actions and none of whom are supervised by myself), but I defend the entirety in front of a judge and go out of my way to make sure that not only can *that* case succeed, but any future ones against similar code won't have to repeat the same nonsense, at great financial expense to myself for little to no gain. For a business, that could be signing your own death warrant if you weren't *faithful* to the cause.
"If they acquire Sun we can kiss Java goodbye... Before you know it'll... sit unsupported for 10 years before IBM admits that it's a dead product."
Good riddance. From a consumer point of view, (on x86 Windows PC's) Java is a heap of slow, self-updating, annoying crap that just makes little things dance about on websites. If not that, it runs games on mobile phones (something which *isn't* going to disappear overnight, even if IBM balls everything up). It's in Blu-Ray and other things. It'll be hard to kill even with the best of intentions but it will be *extremely* easy to improve and leverage and turn into the product it *should* be - in everything, quiet as a mouse, powerful, useful and transparent.
More seriously, IBM have always have quite a heavy hand in Java anyway - the only really decent working Java VM for some phones / Palm devices is the IBM one, not to mention things like Eclipse. If allowed to go through, this might well bolster IBM's reputation as well as it's portfolio. I think IBM can do a lot with Sun... not just Java, but the remains of StarOffice etc. might well be worth bolting in to one of the world's largest providers of desktop systems to industries such as banking etc. More interesting are what will happen to things like Solaris.
Look at it briefly from IBM's point of view and from an Open Source point of view:
- Java (GPL'd now, but still benefits from being run by an OS-friendly company). - StarOffice / OpenOffice (Wow... the possibility of a decent company behind OpenOffice pushing hard for new, critical business features and integration!) - Solaris / OpenSolaris (Kill it off and let Linux take up the slack, or pull things from it into Linux [ZFS anyone!?], or use it as an Open Source Linux rival) - MySQL (owned by Sun!) - Virtualisation (VirtualBox)
This could go one of two extreme ways - either IBM ends up owning a significant chunk of the OS software out there, from operating systems through to applications and technologies, and boosts its OS credentials enormously by doing a good job and becomes a serious rival to MS again (think about it - IBM could give you hardware, operating system, virtualisation tools, databases, office suites and programming languages in one fell swoop and all they have to "pay" for is the hardware). Or, IBM takes all that over, destroys it all and everybody has to fork like mad and lose work to get back to where we are today.
Personally, I'm hoping for (and believing in) the former. Maybe it's time for IBM to do what its acronym suggests and start taking back the business arena by providing good business reasons to use them. Bloody hell - buy an IBM OS on IBM hardware, with an IBM software suite which ties in with other IBM proprietry software (e.g. Lotus etc.)... Wow! I wouldn't be surprised if some anti-monopoly laws are brought into play by a well-known convicted monopoly.
But then, I still think that ThinkPad on a laptop should still mean "Made by IBM" - you can't beat a Thinkpad from the IBM era.
I'm just glad it wasn't a mission to somewhere other than our immediate space. Whether or not the bat survives, throwing a kilo or so of biological/bacterialogical matter around could seriously jeopardise the sterility of some quite interesting places. Send a mission to Mars one week, find the next week that it's overrun by heat-loving bacteria that spread like mad and cover the planet. It's not impossible, and then where would our search for the origins of life be?
Moreover, I'm surprised that they didn't cancel the flight for such a thing. It only needs to slightly dislodge a heat tile, or create some other tiny imbalance and the shuttle crew could be toast. You can't launch in a sterile environment, but if you spotted the damn thing and "just hoped" it would fly away, that's pretty poor risk management. I hope they at least did a quick back-of-the-envelope look to see if it *could* be risky, rather than just hoping it wouldn't be.
I didn't say you can't USE other systems. I said you can't BEAT mouse/keyboard.
- Tiny flick of the wrist and tap of a key = 180 turn (or slightly more, or slightly less, depending on your needs - 3D sound and good knowledge of the terrain make this especially useful), crouch, compensate for height difference (perfectly if you know how), straight into a headshot. You can't do that with anything except a mouse/keyboard (or extremely realistic virtual reality) setup.
- Precision movement of one pixel up and to the left while aiming at distant targets with a non-zoomed, non-autoaimed weapon.
- Finish taking out one target and move onto another without auto-aim turned on (auto-aim is an EXTRA control system) and without losing more than a single bullet in between the targets.
- Not running in straight lines towards key points (yuck!) - with mouse-precision you can actually take optimal routes, walk around obstacles etc.
You just cannot do some of the above AT ALL without a mouse. The ones you can do on a joystick or other control system are hideously limited, slower, less accurate, or all three compared to using even a £5 optical mouse. You can compensate, and when you play against someone who uses similar/same control systems, you'll do fine. But play against an experienced mouse user and you will be at a severe disadvantage. Lightguns are fine for some shooters that don't require a lot of actual movement of the player, but so was the zapper for Duck Hunt... load it up on an emulator and play with a mouse and I guarantee you will get better scores. Even some of the "classic" shooters like Operation Wolf/Thunderbolt are unrecognisable when you play them in an emulator using a mouse for the cursor - it literally goes from a frantic, difficult game, to an easy point-and-click. And when you need to MOVE and shoot, then things become a different matter entirely... you need your weakest hand to move (not your gun hand and certainly not any other gesture, e.g. leaning or using accelerometers etc., because it will be much slower than the fast-twitch muscles in your trained-typist's fingers) and with a lightgun, you are moving a large portion of your body to make it work, thus affecting fine control on your weak hand (try playing with mini-joystick and lightgun, it's quite difficult compared to the rest). A mouse means much less movement. A keyboard, although you don't think it's ideal, actually works much better than even a joystick or D-pad because you can switch from forward to backwards in a flash and have at least five or six easily accessible action buttons within close reach without needing to logically connect "A" with "reload" (the keyboard, if mapped properly to WASD etc., is an incredibly easy and incredibly OLD style of control that's been around for years for a reason).
Don't even get me started on rapidity of buying weapons in CS manually if you're a fast typer versus auto-buy scripts. They just aren't as easy or quickly customisable as doing it yourself.
I'm not a great CS player, but there's no way I can even get close to my keyboard/mouse scores on any other control system and I'm not alone.
First, classic mistake of picking a year SO close to us that there's almost no time to even guess what will happen before it comes around. It's like back in the 60's when everyone was discussing silver-jumpsuit-clad superhumans who live off food-tablets and have computers as their best friends on Neptune in artificial gravity... too much exaggeration in too short a time... all the "incidentals" that aren't mentioned (i.e. minor technical innovations that are mentioned in passing, or just assumed to be present) occur along the way but nobody ever noticed them. Come on, we still haven't properly managed videophones yet, although Skype comes damn close (it's just not "simple" enough that everyone wants to go out and buy a Skype-phone that doesn't need a computer switched on 24/7).
All we've done in the last ten years in gaming is go from Quake to Quake IV... it's all graphics. The *real* innovation in the last ten years has been in things like the Wii (specifically the controller), but STILL nobody wants to look like an idiot by *wearing* anything computer-related... the closest thing we have is fashionable mobile phones that you carry, but you STILL look a pillock with a Bluetooth headset - it's a simple fact.
Games in 2020 will be like games today... they will use the computer's facilities. This will undoubtedly include more speed, more CPU's, more realistic graphics (although "more" sound probably isn't achievable without spending a fortune on specialist hardware), smaller hardware, more touch-interfaces and more networking. The controllers may well change, but they will still be controllers (you can't beat a keyboard/mouse combo for FPS, a D-pad for platformers, a touch-screen for certain simple games, but there may well be "new" genres to take account of new-style controllers too)... you won't want to carry *anything* that you're not going to use throughout the day, certainly not a game controller. They may well integrate (so your phone is just as good a controller for your console as a Wiimote), but commercial "enterprise" will ensure that nothing works together without a hell of a lot of messing about.
We've been *technically* able to have the sorts of games that people are discussing here for DECADES. I've even suggested it myself in the past - combine paintball/lasertag with a real-time 3D game, stick a silly head-display on them and let some nutters run around in an enclosed virtual environment and shoot the crap out of each other (virtually). In an enclosed environment, location of each of the players quickly is almost trivial (especially if they are wearing your hardware), matching a plain warehouse modelled on the in-game map with some actual plain green boxes to clamber over is easy. That same plain-green background can be video processed by the most basic of PC's to overlay player's *actual* position/image into a virtual game perfectly - so you're running around a warehouse with your mates, but in your display, you and your mates are running around a map in Counterstrike. Targetting, aim, distance, recoil etc. is available through a conventional toy-gun accessory. It doesn't matter what it looks like in real life in this case (which is a big plus, because you do look a pillock running around an all-green warehouse firing a cap gun at virtual enemies), so it's easy, cheap and doesn't need a ton of technical expertise. You might only find them in theme parks, or specialist places at first, but we haven't even got *that* yet.
Instead, paintball has died. Lasertag died years ago. The companies that used to do it could *easily* have switched on to new media but didn't, because people *LIKE* the game-reality border, even if it blurs, they still need to know that they (and other, possibly more unstable people) are in a game and not killing real people. Plus, I don't *want* to play the games in real life... I play them to relax, not run around scared that someone will run faster than me, catch up with me and kill me in the game I'm paying to play.
"On the subject of fraud, you can not commit fraud by accident. You can not be complicit in being defrauded, either you were defrauded or you knowingly handled stolen goods. No goods were stolen here, if you used the gift card you (or the card seller it might be argued) simply committed copyright infringement by downloading the music without a license, a civil tort. (In my Nike example the seller performed trademark infringement, the trainers are not stolen, again a tort IIRC)."
You cannot commit fraud by accident, however, you CAN commit fraud through ignorance and/or lying about whether you knew it was "fake" money. And ignorance of the law is no defence. It's all to whether the *Court* believe that you genuinely had no idea that you can't buy $200 giftcards for $40. Again, it's down to the court's interpretation of "reasonable doubt". Additionally, if you were defrauded with the actual cards, you can still *technically* be charged with handling stolen goods (look at the WORDS... *handling* - not "collusion" or "conspiracy" etc.) if at *any* time the COURT believes that you should have known they were stolen... i.e. if you read about it in the paper the next day and don't inform the rightful owner / police.
You have used counterfeit cards to *purchase* perpetual licenses to a piece of music. Your analysis is like saying that using a fake football ticket to get into a football match that isn't standing-room-only isn't fraud. It *is*. You used the card to pay for a service. You purchased a license. That license is *tangible* - it's also a binding legal contract to pay the license fee and thus using *counterfeit* funds to do so, is fraud. It's no different to paying your TV license with a fake / made-up credit card, or buying a set of crystal glasses with fake Green Shield stamps. It's obtaining goods/services by deception and fraud.
Your knowledge of whether you knew or not is pretty much irrevelant once it comes into a court... it's what you *should* have known - and a $200 gift card for $40 is almost certainly "obviously in the wrong". The court can't prove that you *did* or *did not* know the goods were illegal... it's impossible without reading your mind. However, they don't need to in such charges because they just have to prove that, beyond some kind of reasonable doubt, you should have known it was wrong, because EVERY person charged with handling stolen goods, etc. will deny knowing about them. The same sort of definitons apply as to mistakes on website pricing - just because the website says that you can get the 47" LCD TV for £3.99, doesn't mean that you can... there's a certain leeway. However, if it was accidentally priced at £399 instead of £449, then you could *try* and get it for that price and might even succeed. It was a *reasonable* mistake. (In that case, however, the retailer is under much less onus to honour the contract because of certain clauses in their terms of sale).
You can plead guilty or not guilty, but stupidity isn't necessarily an option... otherwise every drug dealer will claim that they have had stuff planted and weren't aware of it and it's *immensely* difficult to *prove* that someone knew they were carrying a bag of drugs. You just need to have the court believe that you *should* have known.
There may *not* be a theft (permanent deprivation, or intention to commit permanent deprivation of property... a *license* to an MP3 can quite easily be argued to be property whether it exists on paper or not, no different to a license for Windows or Office) of MP3's, but that depends on a court's definition of virtual property, not yours. However, there is almost certainly a theft of funds from Apple in creating fake gift cards and using those to pay for services. However you look at it, using funds that don't actually belong to you to purchase a good/service/license is illegal under several laws, in *virtually* every country in the world (I'd be surprised if it wasn't all of them, actually). The technicalities of what charge
In UK law, at least, which is what 90% of the world base their law systems on:
Very simple. It's fraud. They are *fake* cards, issued by a forger. Thus, you can be charged with fraud, or similar offences. Possibly even handling stolen/counterfeit goods, *whether you knew they were fake or not*! It's no different to faking a cheque, or a credit card. In the US, crossing state boundaries with such things can be a federal offence, so if you're not in the same state as the Apple store, it gets even worse.
If you have the *suspicion* that they are fraudulent and / or a reasonable person would suspect them to be fraudulent (by the *court's* definition of reasonable, not yours), you can quite easily be convicted for fraud, or facilitating fraud, or breach of contract (technically a bad cheque is breach of contract and by trying to pass off this card with a retailer, you are saying that it is genuine, hence the sale could be seen as a breach of contract once they find out the money doesn't actually exist - thus they can happily charge you with fraud for the transaction AND breach of contract for failing to pay for the goods another way). It would *not* be as simple as "I just got them from some website." If a reasonable person would have had suspicions, you can *easily* be convicted - it's like saying that this gentleman knocked on the door selling an expensive in-car audio system with the wires cut and dangling, for a pittance. Whether you thought he was genuine or not, you SHOULD have known that he wasn't (just by the price, if nothing else), thus you can be found complicit in the fraud.
Notification of the breach would certainly work in your favour but isn't an automatic get-out clause. Chances are they would pass it over but ask at which point you became suspicious, where you got it from etc. and expect you to co-operate fully. Don't and those fraud charges pop up but now they know exactly who to aim them at... you.
Cyber-nothing. It's fraud, plain and simple, no better than making up credit card numbers and using them to buy things on Amazon. You're not the rightful keeper of any funds that you do manage to get authorized, so you're into theft (if someone can prove that *they* were entitled to the number on the card you used), fraud and maybe even counterfeiting if you can't point out where you got them from. Now, considering that Apple are both the issuer AND the recipient of the cards in question, they have a very good reason to prosecute. You've effectively stolen a credit card and then used it to pay your other Visa bill.
No... my point is that $7bn means that they can ENTIRELY abandon music videos (and, thus, enforce a policy to remove music videos from YouTube) and not even care. In fact, they would probably make MORE money through less hassles. None of that $7bn came from people paying Google to look at music videos, except a TINY, TINY proportion of Google's ad earnings which are probably FAR outweighed by the licensing required for them. But I bet some of those ads fund the record industry indirectly (e.g. a CD-Wow advert on a particular Youtube music video for the CD etc.)
The fact that Google *aren't* being sued shows that the record industry are the hypocrites, because they KNOW they won't make anywhere near as much money if they started annoying the big users of their content - much better to target the end-user and ask them to pay £1000 for a single MP3. If the record industry could AFFORD to lose music videos being available on Google, it would have sued for compliance, etc. and caused lots of hassle by now. They know, though, that would be a stupid move that would alienate them and ultimately cost them a lot of "airtime", so they try to triple (or more) their earnings overnight because Google is bringing them a lot of royalties - however they get *too* greedy and Google do EXACTLY what they should do - refuse to have Music Videos for the countries that are giving them legal/licensing hassle. I'm sure it won't be long before the two "settle their differences" and once again the money flows to the record companies because, to be honest, they need it at the moment and they can't afford to not be present on one of the world's largest websites.
My point is that shouting and bawling in the press about Google not wanting to pay the new, enhanced, shinier (fabricated) royalites isn't going to make Google pay... in fact, the opposite and the UK will be the only country listed on Youtube as "Unavailable for music" because of such stupidity. Does that make Google look stupid? No, they are complying with the law, exactly as the record companies have wanted all this time. Does it make the UK record industry look stupid? Yes, because they are the only ones NOT on Youtube. Greed has become the downfall because Google can *easily* afford to not care, but legally comply, and thus just block music videos for UK Youtube. The *only* people I have heard complain about this have been complaining about the record industry, not Google/Youtube which would seem the obvious choice for the layman to complain about.
I don't particularly care for Google, or Microsoft, or any of the others, but Google don't seem to have done anything wrong - they were paying the previous license (teething problems from the takeover aside, I don't know the details), they wanted to pay the new license but it was too expensive, so they pull videos in the smallest region that is affected by the licensing. Seems to me they did everything they could, to the full extent of the law. Additionally, they are still bound by all the laws they've *previously* been bound by, including being a carrier of other people's creative content - there's nothing stopping the UK or other record industry from obtaining cease-and-desists on anything they find infringing, but Google are *not* necessarily required to police the entire website without notification.
The Pirate Bay, by the way, are on trial for (allegedly) "facilitating" the potential for copyright infringement to occur - nothing to do with the money they made, unless you only read press clippings from a particular party in the case. There's a big difference there, under a different law system, in a case in which there is no decision yet (but it's not looking good for the record industry). I have quite expected Pirate Bay to have legal problems for a very long time now (because they are walking a legal knife-edge in a litigious gray area) and this is the first time anything's happened.
I don't care what the Pirate Bay do... I expect them to get arrested, or sued. It's not my concern a
Record industry (or their representative in some manner) gets stroppy, demands multiples of the usual licensing fee. Google tells them to get stuff (made $7bn last year by NOT caving in to people like you) Record industry up in arms, tries to gather sympathy Everybody else in the UK goes on Youtube to look for the latest Rhianna, finds it's still online, it's just certain "official" and HD versions that you're missing, and carries on as normal (or, at worst, moves to a better video place if they REALLY want high-quality music videos). Google carries on making $7bn a year Record industry misses out on a share of Google's IMMENSE revenues. Artists revolt and put their work on Youtube themselves.
Seriously, is it just me or is the record industry TRYING to commit commercial suicide?
You'll find that this is relatively easy and, technically speaking, still quite inefficient.
Packing problems are inherently complex because there's very little you can do but try every arrangement in clever ways. However, basic human packing is nothing more than throwing the stuff in the truck in the order it arrives. A "good" human can fit more because they do things like "biggest objects first", which in comparison is orders of magnitude more efficient. An skilled human packer goes even better and plans for odd-shapes, uses the flexibility/squashiness of various items in order to pack even better (e.g. put your socks in your luggage last because you can pretty much jam them in anywhere, into all the unusual, difficult-to-fill gaps - or put them inside your shoes and wrap your delicate watch in them first!).
However, the skilled human, although MUCH better than the basic human, is nowhere near the most efficient. They're pretty damn good, however, and for 99.999% of cases, I see no reason to spend the extra to work out the "perfect" arrangement, especially given the inaccuracies and other factors involved (is the parcel squishy, where does the algorithm want me to put it, damn I left something out, now I have to repack the computer's way, etc.). You can give any packing solution as a percentage - "there is only 5% wasted space," etc. with the "optimum" settings usually being a percentage too (i.e. the BEST way to do it is with only 2% space given these parcels). You'll never really fill anything *perfectly*, i.e. 0% wastage, without thousands of years waiting around for a parcel of *just* the right shape.
It took us until very recently to prove that the best way to pack 3D spherical objects into a 3D square container is to use a hexagonal configuration - ever looked at the boxes that fruit are packed in? We've been using it for years, and mathematics *knew* it was the right answer but we've only just *proven* it's the best possible solution. In fact, most animal shells and millions of biological, botanical and other natural processes provide similar answers to the packing problems which were developed by trial-and-error and getting close enough to an answer to be useful.
I would estimate, after years of looking into the mathematics of packing problems and similar years of packing rucksacks for Scout troops, Scout troops and equipment into Scout vans, moving house by myself several times in limited amounts of trips (I did a complete three bedroom house full of years of crap into another, smaller, three bedroom house with *more* crap via three ordinary (Mk5 Ford Transit) van loads and two car journeys of miscellaneous stuff like a cat), jamming two months worth of food into a freezer etc. that your "naive" human packer has anywhere between 10-15% wastage. The "good" human would probably bring that to 5-10% and the perfect human between 2-5%. The computer/algorithm running some of the most complex algorithms in the world, in a cut-down model (no squishy parcels!), in a perfect universe probably can get 1-4% depending on the load. Is it worth the extra hassle to get a solution that (potentially, in ideal situations) gets 1% more parcels into every van versus the amount of time it takes to FIND, COMMUNICATE and IMPLEMENT that solution? Almost certainly not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that, if Amazon did their own deliveries, they'd load the vans as quick as possible to send them out as quick as possible and get them back just as quick. The costs don't balance.
Also, packing problems with real-world uses have a lot more problems - you might well want to pack the items in a certain order (because then you can get at the items you want without having to drive around town randomly according to what parcels you can get to!), the afore-mentioned "squishiness" issues, knowing what size the parcels are in the first place, awkward internal shapes to vans, getting humans to implement anything approaching a perfect solution ("Look, John, the computer say it goes in that hole and sho
1) Venue not working out for you? Change the venue. 2) Finanical model not working out for you? Have a look at why, and change it if necessary. 3) Sinking thousands of hours into something and expecting to make money just because it took you a lot of work? Dreaming. 4) Customers unhappy? You have two choices - lose those customers or please them.
If Facebook isn't giving you the traffic you want, or the type of buyer you want, or the facilities you want, go elsewhere. If the webapp has a good following, then they will follow you off Facebook. If expecting people to sign up to a recurring monthly cost for your web app isn't working, try other methods (larger one-off payment for annual or even permanent access, advertisements, etc.).
If you're working hard on something, it doesn't mean that other people will either appreciate it or want to reward you for it... there are millions of webpages out there that have research papers, etc. that cost a hundred times more time/effort/knowledge/skill to make and they receive *nothing* from their end-users (which, in some cases, can make millions of pounds by building off that research). I'm not comparing the industries, but what you're saying is "It took me a long time, pay for that time"... instead of "Pay for this quality product which you really enjoy"... your time is only precious to YOU, everyone else just wants to buy a decent game.
Pleasing customers sounds REALLY good but if you follow that to its logical extreme, you'll give away the best game in the world for free for ever. You *might* lose a load of users, but the chances are they would *NEVER* have been paying customers anyway. If you lose 20 freeloader players to get 1 paying player, it might well work out better in the long run. Also, if your players don't *WANT* to pay, they can still earn you money with advertisements etc. whether they like it or not. It's all a balance between attracting *paying* customers and keeping *non-paying* customers around to entertain those who paid.
If you *want* to run this like a business, then start doing so - Get some demographics: who are your audience? Do they even *have* credit cards / Paypal? Do they have $3/month spare, or what *would* they gladly pay each month? Do they want recurring monthly payments? How many of them are even remotely interested in paying for the product? How many hours does the average player put in (if it's less than about 4 or 5 hours a week, chances are that VERY few people will pay for that privilege - but the website itself says "The game is intended to be played as little as just a few minutes per day, over many days, weeks and months...")? If you lost all your free players, what's the minimum number of active players you can continue running with (nobody's going to pay if there's nobody to play against)? If you just made it a pay-for app, would you get that number of players, would that number of active players make it profitable or break-even?
You are also trying to run a virtual economy here (you can't just make pay-for players invincible, if they are to compete fairly with non-paying players), so you have to do some very in-depth analysis... say EVERYBODY signs up, does that make the freeloaders disappear and thus kill the in-game economy because there's a mis-balance?
And, what you should have been doing is asking these questions *BEFORE* you put any money you weren't prepared to completely lose into the idea. You can "gamble" on a bright future, but you have to be prepared for the fact that there's a good possibility that nowhere near enough people will ever pay for anything you make - thus any money/time/effort you put in now is a knowing sacrifice. Be prepared to just lose all that effort overnight.
Basically, it all boils down to: Nobody is *required* to give you business.
You can either make decisions (tricky ones!) in order to try to attract some good paying customers, or you can just acknowledge that it'll never be a successful business model and settle for whatev
That people aren't questioning *why* data that they have to *specifically* sign and authenticate the collection use of at the start of a school term (if the school does things by the book), but will happily kick up a fuss about other similar subjects with little to no real impact:
At least 2% of primary school students aren't allowed to go on the Internet, even under supervision, because the parents have "opted out" in a similar manner.
But you can store their fingerprints and other biometric data (under uncertain terms that some legal experts have concluded can *easily* be used, legally, by the police to perform whole-school fingerprint tests against every student in the school without prior notification) in order to allow them to have a library book from the school library. Nobody complains about that.
You can give the students a canteen card that lets the parent look up every meal/snack their child has bought in school (and some schools are even considering banning students from leaving the premises at lunchtimes) and nobody bats an eyelid.
Try and stop the children posting their personal details on web forms in school and signing up to all sorts of websites, all sorts of instant messaging programs, etc. and you face nothing but opposition from staff, students and parents.
It's scary that people are happily marching towards 1984, not for themselves, but their children, removing every liberty they can have.
"Why? At the vast majority of colleges, there is no manual system it's replacing (registers don't tend to get collated till the end of the lesson or day). Besides, I don't see why this prevents escape during a fire, surely the college will have emergency exits!"
Then they DON'T need an automated registration system anyway. But those who DO are replacing an accurate, recorded system with human input and decisions with a machine. I'm in IT and that scares me.
"The system uses infa-red to examine facial features making doing such near-impossible."
Like the fingerprint scanners that "make it near impossible" to use Gummi-bear-moulds of fingers or photocopies of fingerprints printed onto raised PCB's that are then licked? Or the laptop facial-authenticaiton systems that make it "near impossible" to use a photograph to authenticate a user? Or...
ALL of those types of systems are trivially bypassable - nobody has yet demonstrated one that isn't. "Infra-red" isn't magic - it's just taking a photo of someone's face. The infra-red bits can be easily faked, so much so that even just a simple snapshot-and-printout might well copy them accurately enough for it to work if the ink is of a certain, common, bog-standard type without the person trying it even knowing or caring that they are "infra-red". Even if they were depth-measuring, you're looking at nothing more than a papier-mache model, the sort of things the kids will build to have a laugh with the system. And STILL, despite all this technology, even if the users DON'T do these things or the system copes with them, your system STILL has many critical flaws that all lead towards legal and ethical problems.
Teacher's are not very worried about this at all... stress factors for teachers I've spoken to (based on eight years of working in state schools in the UK, but not necessarily experiences of EVERY school I've worked in):
Ofsted Inspections (where you get several days warning, once every few years or so, for an hour of someone watching you do your job, and writing one sentence on it in the school's report). I have seen teachers (even men) break down and cry, be prescribed tranquilisers etc. during Ofsted inspection times. Dealing with kids (because 90% of teaching staff can't control even one child sitting on their own in a room to the same standards that ALL of my teachers did with a class of 30). Internal squabbling (being set up for a fall by fellow staff, backstabbing, gossip, etc.) Not getting their holidays (because, believe it or not, almost all teaching staff are contracted to work the summer holidays... they just take it off and the culture of education just "accepts" that... support staff with identical terms and conditions are denied the same privileges or paid pro-rata). Having to justify themselves (wages, hours, skills, qualifications etc.) Dealing with parents (because they are made to and don't want to because the parent's you NEED to speak to don't care, almost by definition) Everything else.
You have never seen people so bad at their jobs as you see in teaching. I know of a person who set up a private school with fully-qualified, experienced teachers who were all working in other UK schools at the time. The school flopped within two years because the teacher's couldn't mark, couldn't set questions, couldn't plan, couldn't teach, couldn't even speak understandable English in some cases. Parents complained and the school shut - and ALL of these people went back into teaching careers in state schools from which they had come.
I assure you, every fire drill, every fire visit and every actual fire, the registers are the FIRST things checked in a school situation. Fire inspectors are usually very hot (forgive the pun) on it in schools - my last school were rebuked for not having a register of temporary staff (of which I was one and had complained incessantly about it), so even the in-for-an-hour book-readers were made to sign in and out on a physical piece of paper that was collected for every drill afterwards. The fire services are not going to send people into a fire just because there's a *possible* risk... they want to know who, how many, ages, likely locations, etc. because a school is a big place for a fireman to be trapped in, even in a full-on fire suit and breathing apparatus.
I've been present at a real school fire (a canteen had their air conditioning catch fire - I have *no* idea how). It was tiny, the fire was small, controlled, in an outbuilding, extinguished within seconds... the very first thing that happened was that the fire engines arrived (EXTREMELY quickly, because they prioritise schools and hospitals) and before they even got their foot in the gates, they were asking for details of how successful the evacuation was. A single fireman put the fire out with nothing more than an ordinary fire extinguisher, but the chief of the 14 crew that arrived was interrogating the headteacher over their registers before they'd even seen a flame.
You need to be able to clear a school in under two-three minutes and know exactly who's supposed to be present - 1000 students, 100 staff, various visitors and temporary/part-time staff out within two minutes, with a complete record of who's missing (or present when they aren't recorded) is NOT impossible (or even that difficult with proper training) - I've seen it done. Even my wife's bookshop had the same needs when it was inside a large department store - you can't count the customers (obviously) but you have to ensure that all staff are out and that the store is and the only way is to have a physical list of staff and assign them to check *every* corner on their way out. You could be penalised or shut down if you didn't do this satisfactorily by the shopping mall owners.
I don't *care* if it's legally mandated or not... it's possible, it's easy and there's a DAMN good reason for doing so. Don't mess with fire drills - how many other things in your life are ordinary people and children asked to practice (by law in some cases)... this and airline emergency procedures. The difference between trained, recorded staff and chaos can easily cost them ALL (including you, whether you know what to do or not) their lives.
Side note: I'm rarely responsible for children in the schools I work, I have about one fire drill a year if I'm lucky and am often working in unfamiliar surroundings because of the nature of my work, but on the one occasion that the fire bell went off while I was supervising ten primary-school-age children (who all had headphones on in the middle of a computer lesson with loud music blaring) the timing was as follows:
0 seconds - Alarm rings 2 seconds - Alarm has rung long enough to distinguish it from a test, or lesson change, or other siren noise. (if it hadn't, I would have now been standing in the corridor looking out for signs or to ask other staff to investigate what it meant on my behalf). 4 seconds - Children's attention focused 100% on me without panic. 5 seconds - Instructions for headphones off, stand up behind chairs, don't bother to hang headphones up or shutdown or anything. Corridor checked personally by myself while they do this. Children head-counted (there is only one exit from the room they are in, and I'm standing in front of it, so I know they are all still there). List of children under my supervision in hand. 10 seconds - Every child has followed instructions to the letter. There is slight giggling, but no concern from the children. Instruction to queue in a line issued. 13 seconds - Children lined up.
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You mean, like the BIOS-induced "Flash Write Protect" option in virtually every single BIOS ever made in the last ten years or so?
What you say may be true, but it doesn't mean it's the right behaviour for a large company.
Some Spectrums were home-built (I know they offered a solder-kit for cheaper prices than a shop-built one). However, I agree that they had a few design flaws because of the same sorts of problems and component pricing of the time, etc. If I remember, the RAM on the early models was actually bog-standard RAM of the day where one half had failed but left enough to be usable for Sinclair's purposes. The price of buying all-new chips was prohibitive. It was also a bit "open", in that the joystick and rear interfaces were direct electrical connections to the mainboard and that even the expansion socket never had any sorts of covers. I can envisage that all this was *known* at the time and it was the result of a trade-off, but the modern XBox failures seem to be more due to either underestimating the problems, choosing to ignore them, or not knowing about them - whichever way you look at it, that's incompetence.
(P.S. Still a proud owner of at least one working 16K and one working 48K Spectrum with peripherals and tapes - although I have destroyed at least two boards and a PSU for a 48K by being a bit over-exuberant while playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon as a youngster).
Ah, the age-old stupidity. Good graphics != good game. If you think so, you were probably brought up on XBoxes and Playstations, which means that dedicating an evening to one game is probably a struggle and that thinking or enjoying the game is second to "completing" it or showing it to your mates.
I still play Nethack, ffs, and the graphics on that were far too primitive when I started playing that years ago. Give me an emulator and crap graphics any day of the week - there's not many games that you can replay over and over again and still feel you got your moneys-worth every time you replay it.
It's a common fallacy that versatile means "more fragile", propogated by exactly this sort of poor design and manufacture. Just because you've witnessed it, doesn't mean the opposite (i.e. stable, versatile and modern) isn't possible or available. The problem is that almost EVERYTHING modern is rushed out the door to sell it, especially games consoles - build it cheap, stack it high. "Fix it in firmware" are words that you DO NOT want to hear - it means someone isn't doing their job. Even the ability of upgrading firmware should be rarely used, hard to do and positively discouraged.
It's like the people who say "Well, Vista should crash more, it's newer!". No, it shouldn't - it should be learning by the mistakes of the past few decades and be virtually uncrashable (this is NOT impossible - and yet in two trials of Vista I've crashed machines within literally hours of building them for my workplace without even doing anything "fancy" like installing drivers or applications, or installing new hardware, or using unsupported or broken hardware, etc.). In fact, the exact opposite should be true and it should be more reliable, faster on the same machine, and do more, because it's based on decades-old technology with a new sheen. System requirements should not be going up as quickly as they are (almost damn exponential!) - and now that we're hitting limits (CPU speed, etc.), some OS and programs are showing their limitations and actually getting SLOWER on the top-end hardware because they rely on things just getting faster every year. There was a time when a PC upgrade meant that everything ran faster. Now it merely means that things run.
In terms of software, reliability should be going *up* all the time - the software should be getting fixed more and more as time goes on, not thrown out with each new iteration. You win by making things SIMPLE and reuseable, not complex. The simpler they are, the easier they are to find problems, the less they have to go wrong, the easier they are to fix. That's *software*. Easily updateable, changeable *software*. Hardware should be a million times more solid.
Games consoles are enclosed systems. Their hardware has been fixed to a finite set of components that will not change. Their OS software has a long time in which to be designed and is very basic - load game, run it, everything else should be handled by the application, so it's not like you have to update the DirectX drivers to fix a bug in a shader model or some such crap - the game works or doesn't and it's the game manufactures fault if it doesn't (this is the way it SHOULD work, anyway... I'm not surprised that MS basically try to make the XBox a mini-PC because it's all they know). Console hardware is *static*. Thus it can be tested *much* more extensively for problems than, say, my bodge-job, home-built, cheap-component PC which has been up now for over a year and never crashed or experienced a hardware problem (or, for that matter, needed any significant hardware maintenance in that time - I think I blew the dust off the fans once while it was still running). Or the dozens of servers, dozens of "blackboxes" and hundreds of client machines that I've built along the same lines in recent years. These things can EASILY run for decades, even being knocked about and moved in school environments. The BBC-Micro's that I pulled out of a skip last year from one school I work at were still perfectly operational despite years of heavy use and having been stored with no maintenance and then thrown (literally) into a skip and having building rubble thrown on them - THAT is solid-state hardware of thirty years ago! They were originally bought as a set of 15. There were still 15 there, all working - one of them we still used for flashing EEPROM's! We should have moved FORWARD from that, not BACKWARD.
A computer should be switched on, work should be done, and then it should be switched off. Anything that causes that cycle not to work under reasonable conditions (i.e. not dropped, not placed in a
The simple fact is that most programming tasks are inherently linear. Sure, you can design programs that are better, and you can offload work to other CPU's in clever ways, but at the end of the day, you can't do that much better than a couple of major threads per program, with all of them running on an empty CPU.
In Office apps, you can't "offload" anything at all, really. Possibly a spellcheck or grammar check on the side, but you're not going to make *any* gains over the simplistic setups. Why? Because 99% of the program is spent waiting for the user to do something and, when they do, 99% of the time you can complete that task in a matter of microseconds.
In games, you can offload AI, physics, pathfinding, graphics drawing, etc. but at the end of the day you still have to limit interaction to what the user does (i.e. shoots, moves, etc.) and/or the FPS limit. You can get slightly more done by parallelising in that time, purely because the AI is not reliant on the graphics drawing etc., but every 1/60th of a second you have to bring everything to a halt and pass it off to be drawn in order.
In database apps, you can pass off I/O and tricky queries to other threads and so make gains, but you're just introducing a lot of locks, callbacks and everything else to be able to do that. You can scale with that, but you can't scale that far. And at some point, you've got to read the same data off the same disk as on a single-CPU system and pass that, with *all* it's results, to the user.
In operating systems, you can offload a lot of tasks, but again, most of the time you are looking at waiting for user input to actually do something.
It's an inherent limitation of the machinery and the uses, not the design of a particular operating system. Sure, you can make gains over what we have now, but the simple fact is that at some point you have to manage and collate all those seperate tasks into a result and you can't do it until everything's finished. To use games as an example (because they are a mass-market, hardware-pushing, performance-critical application that will routinely make use of multiple CPU's/GPU's to the full extent), you can't necessarily do the AI until the physics has been done (otherwise bots would walk into moving objects that weren't there a second ago). You can't do the graphics until the AI and physics are both done. And over all that, you have to do SOMETHING every 1/60th of a second whether the other threads have finished or not. And there's only so many ways you can split up tasks. You can do graphics rendering in blocks of pixels, as proposed, but at what point does the locking of memory and random bus access killing the memory cache actually make it *less* efficient that just running from 0 to 1024 and then from 0 to 768 (or whatever).
A lot of applications *don't* thread things that they should. On the desktop, asynchronous DNS is a major culprit in my opinion - I should not be able to hang file manager windows, firewalls, browsers, FTP clients, etc. just because my DNS server has gone down or is momentarily inaccessible. And when I click the god-damn Cancel button, then you should CANCEL the other thread as quickly as possible BUT also let me just get on with whatever else I want to do with this app. However, this has nothing to do with multi-core or operating systems, it's to do with single-threaded apps still being made on systems that have reliably handled multi-thread apps (even on single-core machines) for decades. Ideally, EVERY tab in my browser window should be a different thread. It would mean that a tab with a particularly heavy Javascript or particularly slow flash movie will not slow the operation of the browser itself down. It's quite a simple job but a lot of browsers don't do it - there's a reason for that and it's not because GCC or the operating system doesn't include a "pass this off to another thread" function.
The problem is not new, it's not exciting, it's not revolutionary, it's not going to lead to a whole new way to pr
And most of them work just fine in Opera 9.64, despite the scary warnings.
And the ones that don't, it seems to be because Opera deliberately disallows that sort of action (e.g. the pages knowing where they are on screen in relation to other pages).
Intriguing, no doubt. However, does the cost of even 8% extra power to the server really stack up against the air-conditioning or ducting costs at all? That's the problem - it's not that you *can't* run them cold, or hot, it's more likely that one way is just that much more efficient overall.
Personally, I'd be wanting as few moving parts as possible anyway because of the exact problems that you describe, and thus component failures due to the extra heat don't really become a problem. This is why SSD's are on the takeup in datacentres. I'd much rather switch off the air-con, and let the CPU's run hotter and suck more power. (Again, personally, I'd mandate that my datacentre had to have fanless and/or silent systems as much as possible, because you might well gain in the long run by lack of special working arrangements, personnel morale, lack of moving parts, etc.)
I would hazard a guess that it's a damn sight cheaper in *operating costs* (if not initial setup) to run SSD, fan-less (or very few low power fans) systems in a rack and then just let it vent naturally, than it is to run spinning-disk, multiple-fan-driven servers in air-conditioned environment or require special ducting etc. Your startup would have to have proven that to me before I touched you.
Let's face it, if you *want* to cool a computer, there are a million ways of doing it more efficiently than spinning a fan and conditioning all the air in the room surrounding it (I just removed a piece of RAM from a server because it consistently showed 20% greater temperature than identical chips in its place. I replaced a fan on another because it was extremely noisy and doesn't cool any better than a much lower-speed fan. I saved power, heat and component life - but it only cost me a few pounds). It's a question of cost, scalability and practicality. You could water-cool and/or under/over-clock every single server if performance / CPU power consumption were the only issues, but it's just not practical or cost-effective. Massive amounts of electricity are required anyway, most of it running the cooling! (And to handle spikes, and charge the UPS's, and for a safety margin, etc.). But massive amounts of cooling aren't required at all (and you get a bucket-load of your electricity back when you switch it off). The trade-off isn't there.
99% of server components are specced to ludicrous temperatures (e.g. 70 degrees C) anyway, and those that aren't you can easily remove or replace with only minor work. Yes, they will fail quicker and draw more power, but the cost of NOT doing anything is... NOTHING. Just spend what you would have on air-conditioning on new parts/power instead. I don't see how worrying about a few % of power usage is really useful when servers tend to have much more raw CPU speed than they really need (I/O is the limiter in most situations, and thus they could be underclocked or powered down anyway without affecting anything), the efficiency of the power supply and the rest of the system can easily swamp such gains and the air-conditioning really wipes out any potential savings from getting that small %age back. Plus, quite a bit of data-centre hardware is out of the control of the data-centre (e.g. networking, power management, climate monitoring, etc.) so asking them to constantly duct third-party hardware is a bit tough, when they could just not worry about it at all.
It's one of IT's little foibles - we can make a computer that's small, fanless, solid-state, power-saving, no-moving-parts, able to cope with extremes of temperature, shock-proof, even water-tight. We can even get four such systems into a 19" 1U. But the question is what the trade-off's are? Do we lose performance compared to just buying a bog-standard 19" 1U server, do we end up spreading the load too thinly, do we lose out on non-parallelised loads, do we increase the dependency of several server on one piece of hardware, do we have to sacrifice functionality, do we have to buy specialised parts/replacements, do we have to buy from a
This is "new" how? I've been saying this for years and I don't even work in gaming/AI. Any perfectly logical game, the computer AI will incessantly and deliberately fail the game at low levels, thus making it no fun at all. Chess / Snooker / Pool, etc. they all do it... they get the perfect move in under a second that will beat 99.999% of chess players and then discard it because they are supposed to acting stupid and pot the black with a foul that's almost impossible to do *deliberately*.
The *only* way to make AI believable is a feedback system trained to a particular game. Build an FPS, get all the damage, weapons, rules, etc. correct and then just throw some genetic-algorithm bots at it for a few centuries of computer time (hire a damn supercomputer just for this bit if you need to). Penalise the AI for killing the players too much, or being *too* good when it's playing against itself. It will find all the corner cases, all the weaknesses through random variations and use them to their best effect. If you train easy/medium/hard/impossible bots in parallel, your impossible bots should be beating the hard, and so on, and when a human player is placed into the game, they can be "ranked" by the AI. You then use these rankings and statistical knowledge of how much fun each player is having, how old they are, how good a player that *actually* are against other humans and then adjust the rankings/bots accordingly.
Something like Steam is PERFECT for this... provide an "official" Steam bot and you'll have more data for feedback than you can shake a stick out. You can instantly discount all the "stupid" deaths (so you don't get things like bots camping one spot because other bots find it difficult to reach him there etc.) because the GA will sort it all out for you. And because of the way things work, you can even have it auto-adjust to the player in question in real-time if the game is mostly-bots, so if it is kicking the player's arse, it can start toning down a little (not too much) and provide the most fun game (the most fun CounterStrike games are the fairest and closest ones, not the ones where one sides scores 286-0).
Valve should *really* be looking into this... a bot with that much instantaneous feedback is a MASSIVE asset. If you can get it anywhere near playable, self-learning, etc. then you'll be able to run servers full of them rather than have to rely on X amount of players showing up, or the server admin turning bots on manually. You can even tie it in with "death maps" (where in the game most players died and adjust to make sure that the maps are fair for both sides, etc.), global player rankings, achievements, etc. and have it learn new tactics that it *sees*, not just those that it *performs*. So when it dies because of a nice sniping position that the sniper then goes on to control the entire game with, have the both "know" that and try to find ways around him and/or camp that same spot on other servers.
I didn't say it was "clinging", but does it really take that much for it to be cooked into the surface of the fuel tank, or otherwise permanently attached? I'm not saying it could have got to space with nothing more than the little critters hair on fire, but there would be *something* left of it if it *had* stayed attached, which could just be a matter of it being welded to the tank by the heat, or bits of it getting caught in tiny microscopic cracks. Even if that portion was only 0.0001% of it's mass and quite well done, it's still biological matter that can (in certain circumstances) survive in the most extreme conditions - after that, an anaerobic journey and careful re-entry are nothing in comparison.
I don't doubt that you're right, in practice. The point is that in theory, you wouldn't go strapping dead bats to your "sterile" planet.
So you've made the assumptions that: a) bacteria have to live on other life seeing as they are found in radioactive waste and in parts of the world that *have* no other life (e.g. inside the Earth's crust, acidic hot springs etc.), b) heat/cold kills all water-utilizing bacteria (I think we can easily discount this one given the previous information) and c) only water-utilizing bacteria would be present in a dead bat. That's quite a big leap.
It's all moot anyway, the thing probably dropped off before it hit the atmosphere and if it didn't, it would be contained to the Earth's gravitational field.
Guess which one keeps Linux ticking over in the real world? The lawyers are the bit you *can't* get normally. Think about it -I pay you to hack on my system so I can make a new product and/or improve an old one. That requires almost zero dedication from you. Now try - I pay a lawyer to step into court and defend a piece of software that I helped make along with thousands of other people (all of whom are personally accountable to their own actions and none of whom are supervised by myself), but I defend the entirety in front of a judge and go out of my way to make sure that not only can *that* case succeed, but any future ones against similar code won't have to repeat the same nonsense, at great financial expense to myself for little to no gain. For a business, that could be signing your own death warrant if you weren't *faithful* to the cause.
"If they acquire Sun we can kiss Java goodbye... Before you know it'll... sit unsupported for 10 years before IBM admits that it's a dead product."
Good riddance. From a consumer point of view, (on x86 Windows PC's) Java is a heap of slow, self-updating, annoying crap that just makes little things dance about on websites. If not that, it runs games on mobile phones (something which *isn't* going to disappear overnight, even if IBM balls everything up). It's in Blu-Ray and other things. It'll be hard to kill even with the best of intentions but it will be *extremely* easy to improve and leverage and turn into the product it *should* be - in everything, quiet as a mouse, powerful, useful and transparent.
More seriously, IBM have always have quite a heavy hand in Java anyway - the only really decent working Java VM for some phones / Palm devices is the IBM one, not to mention things like Eclipse. If allowed to go through, this might well bolster IBM's reputation as well as it's portfolio. I think IBM can do a lot with Sun... not just Java, but the remains of StarOffice etc. might well be worth bolting in to one of the world's largest providers of desktop systems to industries such as banking etc. More interesting are what will happen to things like Solaris.
Look at it briefly from IBM's point of view and from an Open Source point of view:
- Java (GPL'd now, but still benefits from being run by an OS-friendly company).
- StarOffice / OpenOffice (Wow... the possibility of a decent company behind OpenOffice pushing hard for new, critical business features and integration!)
- Solaris / OpenSolaris (Kill it off and let Linux take up the slack, or pull things from it into Linux [ZFS anyone!?], or use it as an Open Source Linux rival)
- MySQL (owned by Sun!)
- Virtualisation (VirtualBox)
This could go one of two extreme ways - either IBM ends up owning a significant chunk of the OS software out there, from operating systems through to applications and technologies, and boosts its OS credentials enormously by doing a good job and becomes a serious rival to MS again (think about it - IBM could give you hardware, operating system, virtualisation tools, databases, office suites and programming languages in one fell swoop and all they have to "pay" for is the hardware). Or, IBM takes all that over, destroys it all and everybody has to fork like mad and lose work to get back to where we are today.
Personally, I'm hoping for (and believing in) the former. Maybe it's time for IBM to do what its acronym suggests and start taking back the business arena by providing good business reasons to use them. Bloody hell - buy an IBM OS on IBM hardware, with an IBM software suite which ties in with other IBM proprietry software (e.g. Lotus etc.)... Wow! I wouldn't be surprised if some anti-monopoly laws are brought into play by a well-known convicted monopoly.
But then, I still think that ThinkPad on a laptop should still mean "Made by IBM" - you can't beat a Thinkpad from the IBM era.
I'm just glad it wasn't a mission to somewhere other than our immediate space. Whether or not the bat survives, throwing a kilo or so of biological/bacterialogical matter around could seriously jeopardise the sterility of some quite interesting places. Send a mission to Mars one week, find the next week that it's overrun by heat-loving bacteria that spread like mad and cover the planet. It's not impossible, and then where would our search for the origins of life be?
Moreover, I'm surprised that they didn't cancel the flight for such a thing. It only needs to slightly dislodge a heat tile, or create some other tiny imbalance and the shuttle crew could be toast. You can't launch in a sterile environment, but if you spotted the damn thing and "just hoped" it would fly away, that's pretty poor risk management. I hope they at least did a quick back-of-the-envelope look to see if it *could* be risky, rather than just hoping it wouldn't be.
I didn't say you can't USE other systems. I said you can't BEAT mouse/keyboard.
- Tiny flick of the wrist and tap of a key = 180 turn (or slightly more, or slightly less, depending on your needs - 3D sound and good knowledge of the terrain make this especially useful), crouch, compensate for height difference (perfectly if you know how), straight into a headshot. You can't do that with anything except a mouse/keyboard (or extremely realistic virtual reality) setup.
- Precision movement of one pixel up and to the left while aiming at distant targets with a non-zoomed, non-autoaimed weapon.
- Finish taking out one target and move onto another without auto-aim turned on (auto-aim is an EXTRA control system) and without losing more than a single bullet in between the targets.
- Not running in straight lines towards key points (yuck!) - with mouse-precision you can actually take optimal routes, walk around obstacles etc.
You just cannot do some of the above AT ALL without a mouse. The ones you can do on a joystick or other control system are hideously limited, slower, less accurate, or all three compared to using even a £5 optical mouse. You can compensate, and when you play against someone who uses similar/same control systems, you'll do fine. But play against an experienced mouse user and you will be at a severe disadvantage. Lightguns are fine for some shooters that don't require a lot of actual movement of the player, but so was the zapper for Duck Hunt... load it up on an emulator and play with a mouse and I guarantee you will get better scores. Even some of the "classic" shooters like Operation Wolf/Thunderbolt are unrecognisable when you play them in an emulator using a mouse for the cursor - it literally goes from a frantic, difficult game, to an easy point-and-click. And when you need to MOVE and shoot, then things become a different matter entirely... you need your weakest hand to move (not your gun hand and certainly not any other gesture, e.g. leaning or using accelerometers etc., because it will be much slower than the fast-twitch muscles in your trained-typist's fingers) and with a lightgun, you are moving a large portion of your body to make it work, thus affecting fine control on your weak hand (try playing with mini-joystick and lightgun, it's quite difficult compared to the rest). A mouse means much less movement. A keyboard, although you don't think it's ideal, actually works much better than even a joystick or D-pad because you can switch from forward to backwards in a flash and have at least five or six easily accessible action buttons within close reach without needing to logically connect "A" with "reload" (the keyboard, if mapped properly to WASD etc., is an incredibly easy and incredibly OLD style of control that's been around for years for a reason).
Don't even get me started on rapidity of buying weapons in CS manually if you're a fast typer versus auto-buy scripts. They just aren't as easy or quickly customisable as doing it yourself.
I'm not a great CS player, but there's no way I can even get close to my keyboard/mouse scores on any other control system and I'm not alone.
First, classic mistake of picking a year SO close to us that there's almost no time to even guess what will happen before it comes around. It's like back in the 60's when everyone was discussing silver-jumpsuit-clad superhumans who live off food-tablets and have computers as their best friends on Neptune in artificial gravity... too much exaggeration in too short a time... all the "incidentals" that aren't mentioned (i.e. minor technical innovations that are mentioned in passing, or just assumed to be present) occur along the way but nobody ever noticed them. Come on, we still haven't properly managed videophones yet, although Skype comes damn close (it's just not "simple" enough that everyone wants to go out and buy a Skype-phone that doesn't need a computer switched on 24/7).
All we've done in the last ten years in gaming is go from Quake to Quake IV... it's all graphics. The *real* innovation in the last ten years has been in things like the Wii (specifically the controller), but STILL nobody wants to look like an idiot by *wearing* anything computer-related... the closest thing we have is fashionable mobile phones that you carry, but you STILL look a pillock with a Bluetooth headset - it's a simple fact.
Games in 2020 will be like games today... they will use the computer's facilities. This will undoubtedly include more speed, more CPU's, more realistic graphics (although "more" sound probably isn't achievable without spending a fortune on specialist hardware), smaller hardware, more touch-interfaces and more networking. The controllers may well change, but they will still be controllers (you can't beat a keyboard/mouse combo for FPS, a D-pad for platformers, a touch-screen for certain simple games, but there may well be "new" genres to take account of new-style controllers too)... you won't want to carry *anything* that you're not going to use throughout the day, certainly not a game controller. They may well integrate (so your phone is just as good a controller for your console as a Wiimote), but commercial "enterprise" will ensure that nothing works together without a hell of a lot of messing about.
We've been *technically* able to have the sorts of games that people are discussing here for DECADES. I've even suggested it myself in the past - combine paintball/lasertag with a real-time 3D game, stick a silly head-display on them and let some nutters run around in an enclosed virtual environment and shoot the crap out of each other (virtually). In an enclosed environment, location of each of the players quickly is almost trivial (especially if they are wearing your hardware), matching a plain warehouse modelled on the in-game map with some actual plain green boxes to clamber over is easy. That same plain-green background can be video processed by the most basic of PC's to overlay player's *actual* position/image into a virtual game perfectly - so you're running around a warehouse with your mates, but in your display, you and your mates are running around a map in Counterstrike. Targetting, aim, distance, recoil etc. is available through a conventional toy-gun accessory. It doesn't matter what it looks like in real life in this case (which is a big plus, because you do look a pillock running around an all-green warehouse firing a cap gun at virtual enemies), so it's easy, cheap and doesn't need a ton of technical expertise. You might only find them in theme parks, or specialist places at first, but we haven't even got *that* yet.
Instead, paintball has died. Lasertag died years ago. The companies that used to do it could *easily* have switched on to new media but didn't, because people *LIKE* the game-reality border, even if it blurs, they still need to know that they (and other, possibly more unstable people) are in a game and not killing real people. Plus, I don't *want* to play the games in real life... I play them to relax, not run around scared that someone will run faster than me, catch up with me and kill me in the game I'm paying to play.
Now, "all-digital down
"On the subject of fraud, you can not commit fraud by accident. You can not be complicit in being defrauded, either you were defrauded or you knowingly handled stolen goods. No goods were stolen here, if you used the gift card you (or the card seller it might be argued) simply committed copyright infringement by downloading the music without a license, a civil tort. (In my Nike example the seller performed trademark infringement, the trainers are not stolen, again a tort IIRC)."
You cannot commit fraud by accident, however, you CAN commit fraud through ignorance and/or lying about whether you knew it was "fake" money. And ignorance of the law is no defence. It's all to whether the *Court* believe that you genuinely had no idea that you can't buy $200 giftcards for $40. Again, it's down to the court's interpretation of "reasonable doubt". Additionally, if you were defrauded with the actual cards, you can still *technically* be charged with handling stolen goods (look at the WORDS... *handling* - not "collusion" or "conspiracy" etc.) if at *any* time the COURT believes that you should have known they were stolen... i.e. if you read about it in the paper the next day and don't inform the rightful owner / police.
You have used counterfeit cards to *purchase* perpetual licenses to a piece of music. Your analysis is like saying that using a fake football ticket to get into a football match that isn't standing-room-only isn't fraud. It *is*. You used the card to pay for a service. You purchased a license. That license is *tangible* - it's also a binding legal contract to pay the license fee and thus using *counterfeit* funds to do so, is fraud. It's no different to paying your TV license with a fake / made-up credit card, or buying a set of crystal glasses with fake Green Shield stamps. It's obtaining goods/services by deception and fraud.
Your knowledge of whether you knew or not is pretty much irrevelant once it comes into a court... it's what you *should* have known - and a $200 gift card for $40 is almost certainly "obviously in the wrong". The court can't prove that you *did* or *did not* know the goods were illegal... it's impossible without reading your mind. However, they don't need to in such charges because they just have to prove that, beyond some kind of reasonable doubt, you should have known it was wrong, because EVERY person charged with handling stolen goods, etc. will deny knowing about them. The same sort of definitons apply as to mistakes on website pricing - just because the website says that you can get the 47" LCD TV for £3.99, doesn't mean that you can... there's a certain leeway. However, if it was accidentally priced at £399 instead of £449, then you could *try* and get it for that price and might even succeed. It was a *reasonable* mistake. (In that case, however, the retailer is under much less onus to honour the contract because of certain clauses in their terms of sale).
You can plead guilty or not guilty, but stupidity isn't necessarily an option... otherwise every drug dealer will claim that they have had stuff planted and weren't aware of it and it's *immensely* difficult to *prove* that someone knew they were carrying a bag of drugs. You just need to have the court believe that you *should* have known.
There may *not* be a theft (permanent deprivation, or intention to commit permanent deprivation of property... a *license* to an MP3 can quite easily be argued to be property whether it exists on paper or not, no different to a license for Windows or Office) of MP3's, but that depends on a court's definition of virtual property, not yours. However, there is almost certainly a theft of funds from Apple in creating fake gift cards and using those to pay for services. However you look at it, using funds that don't actually belong to you to purchase a good/service/license is illegal under several laws, in *virtually* every country in the world (I'd be surprised if it wasn't all of them, actually). The technicalities of what charge
In UK law, at least, which is what 90% of the world base their law systems on:
Very simple. It's fraud. They are *fake* cards, issued by a forger. Thus, you can be charged with fraud, or similar offences. Possibly even handling stolen/counterfeit goods, *whether you knew they were fake or not*! It's no different to faking a cheque, or a credit card. In the US, crossing state boundaries with such things can be a federal offence, so if you're not in the same state as the Apple store, it gets even worse.
If you have the *suspicion* that they are fraudulent and / or a reasonable person would suspect them to be fraudulent (by the *court's* definition of reasonable, not yours), you can quite easily be convicted for fraud, or facilitating fraud, or breach of contract (technically a bad cheque is breach of contract and by trying to pass off this card with a retailer, you are saying that it is genuine, hence the sale could be seen as a breach of contract once they find out the money doesn't actually exist - thus they can happily charge you with fraud for the transaction AND breach of contract for failing to pay for the goods another way). It would *not* be as simple as "I just got them from some website." If a reasonable person would have had suspicions, you can *easily* be convicted - it's like saying that this gentleman knocked on the door selling an expensive in-car audio system with the wires cut and dangling, for a pittance. Whether you thought he was genuine or not, you SHOULD have known that he wasn't (just by the price, if nothing else), thus you can be found complicit in the fraud.
Notification of the breach would certainly work in your favour but isn't an automatic get-out clause. Chances are they would pass it over but ask at which point you became suspicious, where you got it from etc. and expect you to co-operate fully. Don't and those fraud charges pop up but now they know exactly who to aim them at... you.
Cyber-nothing. It's fraud, plain and simple, no better than making up credit card numbers and using them to buy things on Amazon. You're not the rightful keeper of any funds that you do manage to get authorized, so you're into theft (if someone can prove that *they* were entitled to the number on the card you used), fraud and maybe even counterfeiting if you can't point out where you got them from. Now, considering that Apple are both the issuer AND the recipient of the cards in question, they have a very good reason to prosecute. You've effectively stolen a credit card and then used it to pay your other Visa bill.
No... my point is that $7bn means that they can ENTIRELY abandon music videos (and, thus, enforce a policy to remove music videos from YouTube) and not even care. In fact, they would probably make MORE money through less hassles. None of that $7bn came from people paying Google to look at music videos, except a TINY, TINY proportion of Google's ad earnings which are probably FAR outweighed by the licensing required for them. But I bet some of those ads fund the record industry indirectly (e.g. a CD-Wow advert on a particular Youtube music video for the CD etc.)
The fact that Google *aren't* being sued shows that the record industry are the hypocrites, because they KNOW they won't make anywhere near as much money if they started annoying the big users of their content - much better to target the end-user and ask them to pay £1000 for a single MP3. If the record industry could AFFORD to lose music videos being available on Google, it would have sued for compliance, etc. and caused lots of hassle by now. They know, though, that would be a stupid move that would alienate them and ultimately cost them a lot of "airtime", so they try to triple (or more) their earnings overnight because Google is bringing them a lot of royalties - however they get *too* greedy and Google do EXACTLY what they should do - refuse to have Music Videos for the countries that are giving them legal/licensing hassle. I'm sure it won't be long before the two "settle their differences" and once again the money flows to the record companies because, to be honest, they need it at the moment and they can't afford to not be present on one of the world's largest websites.
My point is that shouting and bawling in the press about Google not wanting to pay the new, enhanced, shinier (fabricated) royalites isn't going to make Google pay... in fact, the opposite and the UK will be the only country listed on Youtube as "Unavailable for music" because of such stupidity. Does that make Google look stupid? No, they are complying with the law, exactly as the record companies have wanted all this time. Does it make the UK record industry look stupid? Yes, because they are the only ones NOT on Youtube. Greed has become the downfall because Google can *easily* afford to not care, but legally comply, and thus just block music videos for UK Youtube. The *only* people I have heard complain about this have been complaining about the record industry, not Google/Youtube which would seem the obvious choice for the layman to complain about.
I don't particularly care for Google, or Microsoft, or any of the others, but Google don't seem to have done anything wrong - they were paying the previous license (teething problems from the takeover aside, I don't know the details), they wanted to pay the new license but it was too expensive, so they pull videos in the smallest region that is affected by the licensing. Seems to me they did everything they could, to the full extent of the law. Additionally, they are still bound by all the laws they've *previously* been bound by, including being a carrier of other people's creative content - there's nothing stopping the UK or other record industry from obtaining cease-and-desists on anything they find infringing, but Google are *not* necessarily required to police the entire website without notification.
The Pirate Bay, by the way, are on trial for (allegedly) "facilitating" the potential for copyright infringement to occur - nothing to do with the money they made, unless you only read press clippings from a particular party in the case. There's a big difference there, under a different law system, in a case in which there is no decision yet (but it's not looking good for the record industry). I have quite expected Pirate Bay to have legal problems for a very long time now (because they are walking a legal knife-edge in a litigious gray area) and this is the first time anything's happened.
I don't care what the Pirate Bay do... I expect them to get arrested, or sued. It's not my concern a
Record industry (or their representative in some manner) gets stroppy, demands multiples of the usual licensing fee.
Google tells them to get stuff (made $7bn last year by NOT caving in to people like you)
Record industry up in arms, tries to gather sympathy
Everybody else in the UK goes on Youtube to look for the latest Rhianna, finds it's still online, it's just certain "official" and HD versions that you're missing, and carries on as normal (or, at worst, moves to a better video place if they REALLY want high-quality music videos).
Google carries on making $7bn a year
Record industry misses out on a share of Google's IMMENSE revenues.
Artists revolt and put their work on Youtube themselves.
Seriously, is it just me or is the record industry TRYING to commit commercial suicide?
You'll find that this is relatively easy and, technically speaking, still quite inefficient.
Packing problems are inherently complex because there's very little you can do but try every arrangement in clever ways. However, basic human packing is nothing more than throwing the stuff in the truck in the order it arrives. A "good" human can fit more because they do things like "biggest objects first", which in comparison is orders of magnitude more efficient. An skilled human packer goes even better and plans for odd-shapes, uses the flexibility/squashiness of various items in order to pack even better (e.g. put your socks in your luggage last because you can pretty much jam them in anywhere, into all the unusual, difficult-to-fill gaps - or put them inside your shoes and wrap your delicate watch in them first!).
However, the skilled human, although MUCH better than the basic human, is nowhere near the most efficient. They're pretty damn good, however, and for 99.999% of cases, I see no reason to spend the extra to work out the "perfect" arrangement, especially given the inaccuracies and other factors involved (is the parcel squishy, where does the algorithm want me to put it, damn I left something out, now I have to repack the computer's way, etc.). You can give any packing solution as a percentage - "there is only 5% wasted space," etc. with the "optimum" settings usually being a percentage too (i.e. the BEST way to do it is with only 2% space given these parcels). You'll never really fill anything *perfectly*, i.e. 0% wastage, without thousands of years waiting around for a parcel of *just* the right shape.
It took us until very recently to prove that the best way to pack 3D spherical objects into a 3D square container is to use a hexagonal configuration - ever looked at the boxes that fruit are packed in? We've been using it for years, and mathematics *knew* it was the right answer but we've only just *proven* it's the best possible solution. In fact, most animal shells and millions of biological, botanical and other natural processes provide similar answers to the packing problems which were developed by trial-and-error and getting close enough to an answer to be useful.
I would estimate, after years of looking into the mathematics of packing problems and similar years of packing rucksacks for Scout troops, Scout troops and equipment into Scout vans, moving house by myself several times in limited amounts of trips (I did a complete three bedroom house full of years of crap into another, smaller, three bedroom house with *more* crap via three ordinary (Mk5 Ford Transit) van loads and two car journeys of miscellaneous stuff like a cat), jamming two months worth of food into a freezer etc. that your "naive" human packer has anywhere between 10-15% wastage. The "good" human would probably bring that to 5-10% and the perfect human between 2-5%. The computer/algorithm running some of the most complex algorithms in the world, in a cut-down model (no squishy parcels!), in a perfect universe probably can get 1-4% depending on the load. Is it worth the extra hassle to get a solution that (potentially, in ideal situations) gets 1% more parcels into every van versus the amount of time it takes to FIND, COMMUNICATE and IMPLEMENT that solution? Almost certainly not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that, if Amazon did their own deliveries, they'd load the vans as quick as possible to send them out as quick as possible and get them back just as quick. The costs don't balance.
Also, packing problems with real-world uses have a lot more problems - you might well want to pack the items in a certain order (because then you can get at the items you want without having to drive around town randomly according to what parcels you can get to!), the afore-mentioned "squishiness" issues, knowing what size the parcels are in the first place, awkward internal shapes to vans, getting humans to implement anything approaching a perfect solution ("Look, John, the computer say it goes in that hole and sho
1) Venue not working out for you? Change the venue.
2) Finanical model not working out for you? Have a look at why, and change it if necessary.
3) Sinking thousands of hours into something and expecting to make money just because it took you a lot of work? Dreaming.
4) Customers unhappy? You have two choices - lose those customers or please them.
If Facebook isn't giving you the traffic you want, or the type of buyer you want, or the facilities you want, go elsewhere. If the webapp has a good following, then they will follow you off Facebook. If expecting people to sign up to a recurring monthly cost for your web app isn't working, try other methods (larger one-off payment for annual or even permanent access, advertisements, etc.).
If you're working hard on something, it doesn't mean that other people will either appreciate it or want to reward you for it... there are millions of webpages out there that have research papers, etc. that cost a hundred times more time/effort/knowledge/skill to make and they receive *nothing* from their end-users (which, in some cases, can make millions of pounds by building off that research). I'm not comparing the industries, but what you're saying is "It took me a long time, pay for that time"... instead of "Pay for this quality product which you really enjoy"... your time is only precious to YOU, everyone else just wants to buy a decent game.
Pleasing customers sounds REALLY good but if you follow that to its logical extreme, you'll give away the best game in the world for free for ever. You *might* lose a load of users, but the chances are they would *NEVER* have been paying customers anyway. If you lose 20 freeloader players to get 1 paying player, it might well work out better in the long run. Also, if your players don't *WANT* to pay, they can still earn you money with advertisements etc. whether they like it or not. It's all a balance between attracting *paying* customers and keeping *non-paying* customers around to entertain those who paid.
If you *want* to run this like a business, then start doing so - Get some demographics: who are your audience? Do they even *have* credit cards / Paypal? Do they have $3/month spare, or what *would* they gladly pay each month? Do they want recurring monthly payments? How many of them are even remotely interested in paying for the product? How many hours does the average player put in (if it's less than about 4 or 5 hours a week, chances are that VERY few people will pay for that privilege - but the website itself says "The game is intended to be played as little as just a few minutes per day, over many days, weeks and months...")? If you lost all your free players, what's the minimum number of active players you can continue running with (nobody's going to pay if there's nobody to play against)? If you just made it a pay-for app, would you get that number of players, would that number of active players make it profitable or break-even?
You are also trying to run a virtual economy here (you can't just make pay-for players invincible, if they are to compete fairly with non-paying players), so you have to do some very in-depth analysis... say EVERYBODY signs up, does that make the freeloaders disappear and thus kill the in-game economy because there's a mis-balance?
And, what you should have been doing is asking these questions *BEFORE* you put any money you weren't prepared to completely lose into the idea. You can "gamble" on a bright future, but you have to be prepared for the fact that there's a good possibility that nowhere near enough people will ever pay for anything you make - thus any money/time/effort you put in now is a knowing sacrifice. Be prepared to just lose all that effort overnight.
Basically, it all boils down to: Nobody is *required* to give you business.
You can either make decisions (tricky ones!) in order to try to attract some good paying customers, or you can just acknowledge that it'll never be a successful business model and settle for whatev
That people aren't questioning *why* data that they have to *specifically* sign and authenticate the collection use of at the start of a school term (if the school does things by the book), but will happily kick up a fuss about other similar subjects with little to no real impact:
At least 2% of primary school students aren't allowed to go on the Internet, even under supervision, because the parents have "opted out" in a similar manner.
But you can store their fingerprints and other biometric data (under uncertain terms that some legal experts have concluded can *easily* be used, legally, by the police to perform whole-school fingerprint tests against every student in the school without prior notification) in order to allow them to have a library book from the school library. Nobody complains about that.
You can give the students a canteen card that lets the parent look up every meal/snack their child has bought in school (and some schools are even considering banning students from leaving the premises at lunchtimes) and nobody bats an eyelid.
Try and stop the children posting their personal details on web forms in school and signing up to all sorts of websites, all sorts of instant messaging programs, etc. and you face nothing but opposition from staff, students and parents.
It's scary that people are happily marching towards 1984, not for themselves, but their children, removing every liberty they can have.
"Why? At the vast majority of colleges, there is no manual system it's replacing (registers don't tend to get collated till the end of the lesson or day). Besides, I don't see why this prevents escape during a fire, surely the college will have emergency exits!"
Then they DON'T need an automated registration system anyway. But those who DO are replacing an accurate, recorded system with human input and decisions with a machine. I'm in IT and that scares me.
"The system uses infa-red to examine facial features making doing such near-impossible."
Like the fingerprint scanners that "make it near impossible" to use Gummi-bear-moulds of fingers or photocopies of fingerprints printed onto raised PCB's that are then licked? Or the laptop facial-authenticaiton systems that make it "near impossible" to use a photograph to authenticate a user? Or...
ALL of those types of systems are trivially bypassable - nobody has yet demonstrated one that isn't. "Infra-red" isn't magic - it's just taking a photo of someone's face. The infra-red bits can be easily faked, so much so that even just a simple snapshot-and-printout might well copy them accurately enough for it to work if the ink is of a certain, common, bog-standard type without the person trying it even knowing or caring that they are "infra-red". Even if they were depth-measuring, you're looking at nothing more than a papier-mache model, the sort of things the kids will build to have a laugh with the system. And STILL, despite all this technology, even if the users DON'T do these things or the system copes with them, your system STILL has many critical flaws that all lead towards legal and ethical problems.
Teacher's are not very worried about this at all... stress factors for teachers I've spoken to (based on eight years of working in state schools in the UK, but not necessarily experiences of EVERY school I've worked in):
Ofsted Inspections (where you get several days warning, once every few years or so, for an hour of someone watching you do your job, and writing one sentence on it in the school's report). I have seen teachers (even men) break down and cry, be prescribed tranquilisers etc. during Ofsted inspection times.
Dealing with kids (because 90% of teaching staff can't control even one child sitting on their own in a room to the same standards that ALL of my teachers did with a class of 30).
Internal squabbling (being set up for a fall by fellow staff, backstabbing, gossip, etc.)
Not getting their holidays (because, believe it or not, almost all teaching staff are contracted to work the summer holidays... they just take it off and the culture of education just "accepts" that... support staff with identical terms and conditions are denied the same privileges or paid pro-rata).
Having to justify themselves (wages, hours, skills, qualifications etc.)
Dealing with parents (because they are made to and don't want to because the parent's you NEED to speak to don't care, almost by definition)
Everything else.
You have never seen people so bad at their jobs as you see in teaching. I know of a person who set up a private school with fully-qualified, experienced teachers who were all working in other UK schools at the time. The school flopped within two years because the teacher's couldn't mark, couldn't set questions, couldn't plan, couldn't teach, couldn't even speak understandable English in some cases. Parents complained and the school shut - and ALL of these people went back into teaching careers in state schools from which they had come.
I assure you, every fire drill, every fire visit and every actual fire, the registers are the FIRST things checked in a school situation. Fire inspectors are usually very hot (forgive the pun) on it in schools - my last school were rebuked for not having a register of temporary staff (of which I was one and had complained incessantly about it), so even the in-for-an-hour book-readers were made to sign in and out on a physical piece of paper that was collected for every drill afterwards. The fire services are not going to send people into a fire just because there's a *possible* risk... they want to know who, how many, ages, likely locations, etc. because a school is a big place for a fireman to be trapped in, even in a full-on fire suit and breathing apparatus.
I've been present at a real school fire (a canteen had their air conditioning catch fire - I have *no* idea how). It was tiny, the fire was small, controlled, in an outbuilding, extinguished within seconds... the very first thing that happened was that the fire engines arrived (EXTREMELY quickly, because they prioritise schools and hospitals) and before they even got their foot in the gates, they were asking for details of how successful the evacuation was. A single fireman put the fire out with nothing more than an ordinary fire extinguisher, but the chief of the 14 crew that arrived was interrogating the headteacher over their registers before they'd even seen a flame.
You need to be able to clear a school in under two-three minutes and know exactly who's supposed to be present - 1000 students, 100 staff, various visitors and temporary/part-time staff out within two minutes, with a complete record of who's missing (or present when they aren't recorded) is NOT impossible (or even that difficult with proper training) - I've seen it done. Even my wife's bookshop had the same needs when it was inside a large department store - you can't count the customers (obviously) but you have to ensure that all staff are out and that the store is and the only way is to have a physical list of staff and assign them to check *every* corner on their way out. You could be penalised or shut down if you didn't do this satisfactorily by the shopping mall owners.
I don't *care* if it's legally mandated or not... it's possible, it's easy and there's a DAMN good reason for doing so. Don't mess with fire drills - how many other things in your life are ordinary people and children asked to practice (by law in some cases)... this and airline emergency procedures. The difference between trained, recorded staff and chaos can easily cost them ALL (including you, whether you know what to do or not) their lives.
Side note: I'm rarely responsible for children in the schools I work, I have about one fire drill a year if I'm lucky and am often working in unfamiliar surroundings because of the nature of my work, but on the one occasion that the fire bell went off while I was supervising ten primary-school-age children (who all had headphones on in the middle of a computer lesson with loud music blaring) the timing was as follows:
0 seconds - Alarm rings
2 seconds - Alarm has rung long enough to distinguish it from a test, or lesson change, or other siren noise. (if it hadn't, I would have now been standing in the corridor looking out for signs or to ask other staff to investigate what it meant on my behalf).
4 seconds - Children's attention focused 100% on me without panic.
5 seconds - Instructions for headphones off, stand up behind chairs, don't bother to hang headphones up or shutdown or anything. Corridor checked personally by myself while they do this. Children head-counted (there is only one exit from the room they are in, and I'm standing in front of it, so I know they are all still there). List of children under my supervision in hand.
10 seconds - Every child has followed instructions to the letter. There is slight giggling, but no concern from the children. Instruction to queue in a line issued.
13 seconds - Children lined up.